medicine

A San Antonio-based company called Xenex has risen to media prominence recently thanks to their ultraviolet pulse robot called Little Moe. The robot can enter and clean a hospital room in five minutes and destroy the virus by fusing its DNA. You can watch the cute local news piece about the below.
The technology isn’t particularly new. It works by flashing surfaces with ultraviolet… Read More

One of the biggest problems with printing human meat was the creation of blood vessels and ventricles. Making a solid mass of flesh was easy but adding a way to pump blood and other nutrients through the flesh was more difficult. Now researchers at the University of Sydney, Harvard, Stanford and MIT, have solved some of these problems by creating a skeleton of vessels and then growing human… Read More

In the field of fitness trackers and apps, evidence of their efficacy is often anecdotal. The New York-based health startup Noom is looking to back their technology up with harder evidence, though, and they have received a small business grant from the National Institutes of Health to do so. Read More

Although blood tests are meant to tell you something about your internal state of affairs, it usually feels like you need a medical degree to decipher the results. A New York-based startup called Luminate Health has raised a $1 million seed round led by KEC Ventures to do just that.
A graduate of the health tech accelerator Blueprint Health, Luminate is promoting patient empowerment by… Read More

Google’s Knowledge Graph is quickly becoming one of the key features of the company’s search engine and today, the company added yet another area of information to the project. Starting now, users who search for medications will see a box with key facts about them in the right-hand sidebar of Google Search. This data, Google says, comes from the U.S. FDA, the National Library… Read More

QuantiaMD, one of a growing number of companies attempting to build the LinkedIn for the medical community, today announced that it has raised $12 million in venture financing from Fuse Capital. The expansion round is the company’s largest raise to date and brings its total outside investment to $27 million. Read More

When I’m not writing for TechCrunch, my “day job” is working with healthcare providers the disruptive innovators who are reinventing healthcare and slaying the healthcare cost beast as a byproduct. In some cases, these are entrepreneurs. In most other cases, they are pioneers within existing healthcare providers fighting to make changes within otherwise slow-moving organizations. Read More

Today, I participated in a meeting at the White House described as an “expert roundtable on patient access to health data” hosted by Todd Park (Chief Technology Officer of the United States), Farzad Mostashari (the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology), Leon Rodriguez (Office of Civil Rights) and Peter Levin (CTO Veterans Administration).
Being at the White… Read More

This is the second part in a two-part series on strategic investors in healthcare.
Healthcare IT departments have focused much of their attention on the $19 billion portion of the stimulus bill that is providing billions of subsidies for the adoption of electronic health records. While this is logical given the available money, it is paying for health IT systems optimized for the “do… Read More

Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft’s Health platform business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.
Pharmaceutical companies… Read More

I know of no industry where technology is as despised as it is in healthcare. It’s telling that it took government money to incentivize healthcare providers to finally do what virtually every other industry has done — apply information technology to streamline processes. “Established technology is being given a federally funded new lease on life,” athenahealth CEO… Read More

In the New Yorker, Dr. Atul Gawande outlined how, at the turn of the 20th century, more than forty per cent of household income went to paying for food and food production consumed nearly half the workforce. Starting in Texas, a wide array of new methods of food production were tested. Long story short, food now accounts for 8% of household budgets and 2% of the workforce. As a wide array of… Read More

While sitting in my dentist’s chair recently, I marveled at just how scary looking many of the implements on his tray were. And don’t get me started on that contraption I put my face into at the optometrists! It’s hard to believe that these implements of modern medicine will some day appear as quaint — and arguably as effective — as instruments of yore, like… Read More

Researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who have been researching AIDS for almost a decade, have come up with a novel new way to fight the immunovirus. Traditional vaccines didn’t seem to be working, so Dr. Philip Johnson, chief scientific officer at Children’s Hospital, shifted gears, and used muscles to deliver a gene in order to create a protein that… Read More

It’s pretty easy, in this day and age, to get frustrated with technology, and lose sight of how awesome our world is as a result of technological innovation. Every now and then some piece of news will come along to remind us of how great technology can be, leading us on an adventure of knowledge, and restoring our appreciation for science. Today, that news is word that the 50,000th… Read More

What’s this, the iPhone actually being used to improve people’s lives? I’m speechless. There’s a new App in the App Store called Allscripts Remote that allows doctors to remotely access a patient’s medical records right from his or her iPhone (or iPod touch). The idea is that, in an emergency, a doctor won’t have to wait around while the hospital staff pulls… Read More

Someone decided to be clever and actually put technology to good use (as opposed to pouring endless amounts of money into developing bigger and bigger TVs), having developed a refrigerator of sorts that doesn’t require any electricity to operate. A team at Stanford, funded by a VC dude by the name of Adam Grosser, came up with a device that essentially works like a big hand warmer, but… Read More

Must everything begin with an “i” because it’s getting a bit dull and the sheep might think Apple invented it?
Philips has announced the development of an “intelligent pill” that they plan to present at the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists this month in Atlanta. The magically delicious iPill includes a microprocessor, battery, wireless radio, pump… Read More

There’s an experimental necklace developed by the Georgia Institute of Technology that reminds you to take your medicine. Users must first ingest a special pill, along with your other pills, that contains a small magnet, which then activates the necklace. The necklace then records when, exactly, you swallowed the pills. That way, your nurse or caregiver can know when, or if… Read More

A new prosthetic hand is being tested in Germany right now that has individual movable fingers that are nimble enough to type on a keyboard. It’s also sensitive enough to pressure that one using it can pick up a styrofoam cup without crushing it, something not possible before.
It’s still in the prototype stage, but the company behind the hand, Touch Bionics, is now looking for… Read More